


Finding (Water)

by WahlBuilder



Series: As The Old Gods Before Us [7]
Category: Mars: War Logs, The Technomancer (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, First Meetings, Multi, Pre-Relationship, Technomantic Culture, twenty headcanons in a trench coat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-24 17:28:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22001710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WahlBuilder/pseuds/WahlBuilder
Summary: The company is severely down on water, but Temperance has promised to find them water.It is not the only thing he brings them to.
Relationships: Roy/Innocence Smith/Tenacity Williams, Sean Mancer/Zachariah Mancer
Series: As The Old Gods Before Us [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1300484
Comments: 1
Kudos: 2





	Finding (Water)

_‘I guess “Temperance” doesn’t fit.’_

_‘I do belong here… I’ve done some things.’_

_‘You’ll be welcome.’_

_‘Why? You applying?’_

_‘I have to do something.’_

_‘They’re human beings, you know?’_

_‘Sometimes I’m full of anger. But I’ll be fine. Thanks to you I think I’ll be fine.’_

_‘Take it easy, kid…’_

_‘Those bastards have a machine gun!’_

_‘He’ll hate me.’_

_‘You know Roy? Temperance?’_

‘—are you certain? Ran?’

Opened eyes and looked at the one talking. White hair like soft fur, sharp noble features with a dash of arrogance, a wide mouth, and the wires, like a prince’s circlet—or a head restraint.

Sean. His brother.

_[The camp overseer—]_

He blinked. ‘Yes, Sean. I’m certain we’ll find water behind that hill.’

The supplies had been getting scarce, and Taiko, lugging the cistern and the purifier system, was being capricious. Yao didn’t allow Temperance to talk with Taiko, but Temperance could see the mechanic was getting desperate.

_[‘I was the Guild’s Dowser. Didn’t you know?’]_

Temperance got up.

They were a party of five: Sean himself (Temperance knew Sean all but stopped taking his due of the rationed water); Zachariah with a rifle, covering for his mentor, one hand flexing with a Technomantic glove. Tenacity, his crossrifle in hands, eyes intent, prowling on soft feet. Temperance the hound, trotting without sinking in the sand, without making a sound.

The hill was gouged by storm-winds as though claws. Temperance touched the warm rock, dragged a finger along a groove. The full bodyglove enhanced his senses.

He could feel them all: Zachariah gravitating to Sean, and the other way around. The hound. Tenacity.

There was a gravitational pull there, too.

Temperance needed a trine. It was not even thought about because to get a trine was a part of life. If one could not, or did not want to, have a trine, one was no less than others, though it was strange. But Temperance _needed_ it. How much time did he have left before he’d have to disintegrate his body so that his mind didn’t disintegrate the world? Did he care about the world at all? It wouldn’t make any difference. All of them would be gone—no pain, no memories, no regrets.

It would be so easy. It would be a fulfilment of his vows, in a way. He wasn’t a bodhisattva by any stretch of imagination, he wasn’t a ‘god’—gods didn’t exist, but still, he had his vows. He knew that, in a way, all the rituals and vows and parts of the training in his Order was designed to keep the Technomancers humble, to remind them that, while having powers and being very different from non-Technomancers, their ultimate purpose was to help.

Maybe there wasn’t any universal love, like there weren’t any gods. Maybe there was no way of escaping their endless cycle of cause and effect—because there wasn’t, really, any cycle. Maybe his vows were nothing but clever mind tricks and delusions. And if he destroyed everything, none of it would matter anyway—because there would _be_ nothing. Or rather, _nobody_ to think about it. There would be no wars, because there would be nobody to fight them; there would be no dancing except for the dance of the stars that nobody would witness anymore; there would be no sorrow, no joy, no suffering, no illness, no hate, no tenderness.

He looked at them. What were they? He struggled to understand. It was as difficult as understanding moles, and just as useless. He wouldn’t understand them because they were vastly different. And they wouldn’t understand him...

He blinked. No. He had to remind himself that he could—that he _must_ —understand. Or at least... pretend he could.

And he didn’t need to understand them to do kindness.

If he ever forgot himself, that was why he was keeping his staff in his lungs. If he lost himself, he would lose concentration necessary to maintain it in its dispersed form—and, having an affinity for its full form, it would naturally reshape itself. Ending the threat of him.

He wanted to walk into the desert. Leave all this behind. But for now, he had a purpose. He was looking. And he knew where he could find what he was looking for.

He was circling the hill. He knew his goal was there—he had covered it, obscured it from his companions, by necessity. They would probably hate him, though he wasn’t sure. He was never sure around people. They thought in ways he struggled to untangle.

The world sang. That was, Temperance’s mind folded those various sounds into a song—a need to find a system to everything, a pattern. The world didn’t sing _for_ him, although he rather liked the poetic theory that the universe craved to be witnessed. The world simply sang—and he was listening. Unable to explain or describe or transfer his knowledge of it—open to the things that were silent to others, but silenced himself.

The ground beneath his feet thrummed in a low, brassy basso, the thin veil of sand covering it adding a whisper. Deeper still, the planet was roaring in four hundred voices, low: a mighty bellow—Temperance would have droned to try to replicate it. The wind was coming from the south—gusty in its physical character, but high-pitched to Temperance’s perception, like a usually clear-voiced singer having caught a cold and now breaking every few moments. Another hill to the north, like a chin sticking out, was sighing more than singing.

Words were Temperance’s weapon and shield and armour that he could not always put on properly—but this was beyond words. It was patterns that could scarcely be described in any language, be it notation or lexemes or arcs of the signing.

People folded in patterns also—but he had to remind himself that they were more than the categories his mind filed them under. Those reminders had a humbling effect, but led to a constant state of heightened anxiety. He couldn’t read people and forbade himself to project their actions through patternisation—and combined, those two features left him blind.

However, he could tell his decision being carried out by them unwittingly would cause a stir. Perhaps a consternation, a castigation. He hoped he would be able to weather it.

He wondered, though, whether in that inevitable fallout Tenacity would take his side, or at least defend him. Temperance knew of the bond in an abstract manner, and there were those glimpses of possibilities, things as they could have been but would never be _here_ through the simple reason of _here_ being different in ways big and small. Temperance could not take those things as the basis for his considerations for the same reason.

How did his actions matter anyway in any world? They mattered to each individual life he helped along the way, true, but in the grand scheme of things, nothing mattered. And yet he had to remind himself, over and over, that if it mattered to that one person he could help, then it was enough. It was enough. There were several groups of thinkers in his Order: one should do neither evil nor good, a group said, because nobody could predict all the outcomes of one’s actions. What was good for one, turned evil for another. But then, there were the vows, and how could he ignore them, or reconcile them with that school of thought? To know no rest until every being was saved, and to start with just one life, and it would be enough. But _what_ was, truly, ‘saving one life’? And how could he ponder philosophical dilemmas when there were people starving and thirsting, when many could not afford to wonder about such matters simply because they were occupied with trying to survive?..

Overwhelmed by thoughts and emotions, he nearly walked into those he had been searching for, and a few moments longer—and his companions would walk into them also, and disguising them would be useless.

He took a glance over them, and his heart filled to overspilling with an echo of what he thought they could be feeling: despair and hopelessness—and then, that certain numbness that came after living in the grip of passions for too long. Temperance pushed those emotions aside, reminding himself he couldn’t know exactly what they were feeing.

The hound nudged his shoulder. His companions were too close.

He dropped the veil.

Zachariah hissed, and Sean’s field hissed also, bitter in the aftertaste, and those people looked up. A few scrambled to stand, but keeping the whole night under the shadow had taken its toll: one soldier fell with a cry, and hands brought them back down again. There were a few guns—and many faces which remained blank.

They were about three dozen people, and their uniform was rags now, the plains erasing signs of identity, but a glimpse of blue here and there—foolish for wandering—and certain tattoos and the configuration of guns, but more than that, the rapt attention with which some of the lucid ones looked at Temperance’s blue robes were enough to scream about their allegiance (formal or not, it didn’t matter right now).

‘Ran, what’s going on?’ Tenacity asked, voice tight. ‘These people are…’

Temperance pushed through the throng. He felt fingers gabbing his blue robe, too feeble to hold him off. He looked around, into each face. Could it be that he was wrong? No, finding those people wasn’t wrong on itself, but—

And there he saw.

He strode forward, into the middle (did they put _him_ in the middle because they saw a child in him, even though they knew he couldn’t be? or because he was stunned and they deemed him useless? because they sensed that out of all of them he—)—and then stopped. And lowered himself onto one knee, into the giving warmth of sand.

‘Innocence,’ he called.

Big blue eyes looked at him without seeing from under blond eyelashes—he deserved being not-seen, of course,—and then focused.

‘Do I know you?’ He was slouching—maybe instinctively trying to look smaller or maybe simply through being too tired. The jacket he was wearing belonged to someone else—someone Innocence used to be, perhaps, or some other person entirely.

‘No,’ Temperance replied. ‘But you will. I am called… Ran.’

‘Ran.’ There was a scar near Innocence’s left eye, fleeing into his shorn hair. Flecks of dust and sand clung to his head. The scar wasn’t from a nail graze—it was from a knife. A shiv.

Temperance would have found whoever had done it, and burnt them to cinders, to ash, to less than ash—he could. There was little he couldn’t do—but so much that he _wouldn’t_.

He was needed _here_ , even if the need was one he had taken upon himself without anyone knowing.

‘Temperance!’ Sean called. His was commanding—commanding him, Temperance understood. But they were equals, kindred, siblings, Temperance was free—and it was the burden both of them had to bear. ‘What’s all this?’

The field stung, and Temperance shielded those people from it—telling himself Sean was blinded by anger and confusion and didn’t mean to hurt them. Temperance got up before he could be hauled, and turned to face his brother’s anger.

Barely-controlled, anger behind a cold mask suited Sean, but robbed his eyes and features of the human softness that suited him even more. It wasn’t difficult to read, that anger, even for Temperance.

‘You promised water,’ Sean hissed, just like his field. ‘And instead you led us to…’ He stopped and glanced about, and some of that softness, that kindness that grew through his heart like thorns, showed for a moment. Then he looked again at Temperance, and spoke in a low voice: ‘We cannot take in more. We _can’t_ —not because they’re Aurora, but we simply. Fucking. _Can’t_. There isn’t enough resources, isn’t enough _water_ —’

He breathed out his staff, closed his fingers on it, and struck the rock with it, sand blown away.

The fountain that spouted up made the blue of his robes deeper. He looked at Sean. ‘Here is water, as promised, brother. _Nobody_ will be left behind.’


End file.
